War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [207]
“What has happened?” he asked himself. “I killed a lover, yes, I killed my wife’s lover. Yes, it happened. Why? How did I come to that?” “Because you married her,” an inner voice answered.
“But what am I to blame for?” he asked. “For having married her without loving her, for deceiving both myself and her,” and he vividly pictured that moment after supper at Prince Vassily’s, when he had spoken those words: “Je vous aime,” which had refused to come out of him. “It’s all because of that! I felt then, too,” he thought, “I felt then that it was wrong, that I had no right to it. And so it turned out.” He recalled their honeymoon and blushed at the recollection. Especially vivid, insulting, and shameful for him was the recollection of how once, soon after his marriage, he had come from his bedroom to his study, before noon, wearing a silk dressing gown, and in his study had found his head steward, who bowed respectfully, looked at Pierre’s face, at his dressing gown, and smiled slightly, as if expressing with this smile a respectful sympathy for his employer’s happiness.
“And how many times I felt proud of her,” he thought, “proud of her majestic beauty, her worldly tact; proud of my house, in which she received all Petersburg, proud of her inaccessibility and beauty. So this is what I was proud of?! I thought then that I didn’t understand her. How often, pondering her character, I said to myself that I was to blame, that I didn’t understand her, didn’t understand that eternal calm, contentment, and lack of any predilections and desires, and the whole answer was in this terrible word, that she is a depraved woman: I said this terrible word to myself, and everything became clear!
“Anatole would come to borrow money from her and would kiss her bare shoulders. She didn’t give him the money, but allowed him to kiss her. Her father, joking, tried to arouse her jealousy; she said with a calm smile that she was not so stupid as to be jealous: he can do as he likes, she said of me. I asked her once whether she felt any signs of pregnancy. She laughed scornfully and said she was not such a fool as to want to have children, and that she would not have children from me.”
Then he recalled the clarity and coarseness of thought and the vulgarity of expression typical of her, despite her upbringing in high aristocratic circles. “I’m not such a fool…go and give it a try…allez vous promener”*280 she used to say. Often, looking at her success in the eyes of old and young men and women, Pierre could not understand why he did not love her. “And I never loved her,” Pierre said to himself. “I knew she was a depraved woman,” he repeated, “but I didn’t dare admit it to myself.”
“And now Dolokhov—sitting on the snow, with a forced smile, maybe dying, and responding to my regret with some sort of swagger!”
Pierre was one of those people who, despite their ostensible weakness of character, as it is called, do not seek to confide their grief. He worked over his grief alone with himself.
“She, she alone is to blame for everything, everything,” he said to himself. “But what of it? Why did I bind myself to her, why did I say that ‘Je vous aime’ to her, which was a lie, and still worse than a lie,” he said to himself. “I’m to blame and I must bear…But what? The disgrace to my name, the unhappiness of my life? Eh, it’s all nonsense,” he thought, “the disgrace to my name and honor—it’s all a convention, it’s all independent of me.”
“Louis XVI was executed for being, as they said, dishonest and criminal,” came into Pierre’s head, “and they